Over by Fridtjof Nansen we could not go; this mountain here rose perpendicularly, in parts quite bare, and formed with the glacier a surface so wild and cut up that all thoughts of crossing the ice-field in that direction had to be instantly abandoned.

As we thought, there was a side-glacier coming down into it, with large, ugly crevasses in many places; but it was not so bad as to prevent our finally reaching, with caution and using good brakes, the great main ice-field -- Axel Heiberg Glacier.

As we thought, there was a side-glacier coming down into it, with large, ugly crevasses in many places; but it was not so bad as to prevent our finally reaching, with caution and using good brakes, the great main ice-field — Axel Heiberg Glacier.

By its own power of impulsion our apparatus made a canal for itself; some times carried away by its own impetus, it lodged on the ice-field, crushing it with its weight, and sometimes buried beneath it, dividing it by a simple pitching movement, producing large rents in it.

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"The ice-field begins in late summer as young ice in Baffin Bay. Slowly it moves south. In November off Labrador the sea is dappled by small circular pieces of ice that have been chopped and crushed to a snowy consistency by wind and sea. Under winter's encouragement this grows rapidly into blocks six to ten feet in diameter, a lovely translucent green with white edges created by constant grinding against other pans. This is known to mariners and sealers as slob ice. On calm winter nights off the Labrador coast the sea freezes until these blocks are embedded in large sheets of ice that may be several miles in length, but are constantly forming and reforming under pressure of sea and wind. This becomes the sheet ice that is the home of the whelping seals."--Cassie Brown with Harold Horwood, Death on the Ice: The Great Newfoundland Sealing Disaster of 1914, Doubleday Canada, 1972.